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FDA To Regulate E-Cigarettes Like Tobacco (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have been all the rage lately, as many claim they are healthier than traditional tobacco cigarettes. Since they are so relatively new to the market, the government hasn't been able to effectively study them and determine whether or not they should be regulated like traditional cigarettes and smokeless tobacco -- until now. The FDA has released their final rule Thursday, broadening the definition of tobacco products to include e-cigarettes, hookahs, pipe tobacco, premium cigars, little cigars and other products. "Going forward, the FDA will be able to review new tobacco products not yet on the market, help prevent misleading claims by tobacco product manufacturers, evaluate the ingredients of tobacco products and how they are made, and communicate the potential risks of tobacco products," the agency said. The new rule will go into effect immediately. According to CDC data from 2014, e-cigarette use among adults has gone up about 12.6%. People under the age of 18 will no longer be able to buy these products with the new regulations, and the products will be required to be sold in child-resistant packaging. In addition, the government will now be able to have a say in what goes into the products. Previously, there was no law mandating that manufacturers tell you what you are inhaling when trying their products.
that's a matter of perception.
ummm, are you aware of the profits?
The federal government has ZERO authority to do this. Nowhere in the US Constitution are "substances" allowed to be regulated at the federal level. And because of that, the 9th and 10th Amendment prohibit such regulation.
Libertas in infinitum
Vox has a better rundown of the FDA's announced regulations.
The good news is that it's not armageddon for vapers and sellers:
the FDA is allowing companies to continue to sell their products for up to two years while they submit their applications to the agency — and for another year during the approval process.
When I smoke, I still smoke cigs. But I have lots of friends who vape. Personally, I find the propylene glycol vapor more irritating than tobacco smoke.
I can see the fnords!
So they can tax the fuck out of it. Can't have something stealing tax dollars from uncle sugar now can we?
Thus does the FDA demonstrate with the occasional bad rule the ability to cost more lives than it saves.
Go after charlatans, sure. But this needing permission to move slows thing down, which means more deaths as alternatives are delayed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
My vape uses medical grade nicotine in the liquid, I wouldn't call that a tobacco product. Even then the nicotine is completely optional, I've been decreasing how much is added to my liquid slowly and expect to completely wean myself off nicotine eventually. Vaping is how I quit smoking tobacco products (cigarettes) and thanks to a locally owned vape shop chain I now spend hundreds less on my nicotine addiction with much less danger to my health. (yes there is still the danger of the flavor additives and nicotine itself) So are they now going to regulate vapes and liquids? It sure looks like it...
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Because it has been repeatedly shown that trying to outlaw any kind of drug only leads to even worse health problems, violence, crime, loss of citizen's rights, loss of revenue, increased government spending, and just all around misery.
Tax it, sure. Regulate it, sure. Especially when it comes down to forcing manufacturers to accurately inform their customers of the contents of the product and any potential risks. Or putting restrictions on where and when people can imbibe the drug in question. (One can argue about what exactly those limits should be, but at least some things like "don't smoke in indoor public spaces" and "don't drink while driving" are perfectly reasonable.)
But outlawing tobacco (or any other popular drug) would just be a disaster for everyone.
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How about personal freedom. How about you have a right to your own body. If you can abort a fetus certainly you can decide whether or not to smoke a cigarette.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Who has a lot to gain from making a prohibitively costly barrier to entry for small vendors?
Maybe the same ones who benefited form the outlawing of "flavored" type cigarettes that were sold by niche retailers.
Big tobacco is alive and well, the pitiful thing is that now they are doing their bidding with full public support.
I know someone who died of Emphysema who enjoyed every last cigarette they smoked, to their dying day. It is a matter of perception, and why should you push your perception on other people who do not share it? If you're able to do that with cigarettes, can I do it with something you might like, like porn or bacon or ...??
Basically, who "perception" (aka Opinion) counts more, yours or mine?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What do you mean? Nicotine is a mild cognitive stimulant -- just like caffeine. The only harmful part of cigarettes is the actual delivery mechanism (the smoke). Since e-cigarettes don't have tobacco smoke (they use water vapor), they are effectively a new form of nicotine gum or nicotine patch. The only reason they are being treated with suspicion is the believe that they will de-stigmatize smoking of actual cigarettes. This is literally trying to use a healthcare agency (FDA) to regulate an element of cultural perception.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Also if you have schizophrenia. Nicotine is an anti-psychotic, and can reduce the tremors caused by some other anti-psychotic meds. About 80% of people with schizophrenia smoke, compared to about 20% of the rest of the population.
Nicotine gum and patches are 18+ in almost every state.
Which is weird in itself. As stimulants go, nicotine is somewhere around caffeine. But coffee and caffeinated drinks are not regulated... well, at least not for caffeine content (some are for sugar content).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
How about personal freedom. How about you have a right to your own body. If you can abort a fetus certainly you can decide whether or not to smoke a cigarette.
Its not like they are going to ban them, so you will be able to exercise that right. They simply will put in a age limit, which makes sense, and require warning labels.
Absolutely! I'm all about personal freedom.
I'd love the freedom to walk down the street without some douchebag walking in front of me and creating chemical clouds in my path. I'd love the freedom to enjoy the outdoors seating area at a cafe without having cigarette smoke mingling with my coffee. And I'd love the freedom to take a break every hour at work to do nothing.
I'm all for one's personal freedom to ravage one's own body with 7000 chemicals condensed into a single, burning stick. But I'd like the freedom from that being inflicted on me in public spaces, too.
Mine. Because I am partially paying the health care costs of the guy who died of emphysema.
You do realize that people who use chewing tobacco get all sorts of oral cancers, right?
From the tobacco content. Not from nicotine. Otherwise, nicotine patches and nicotine gum would be just as likely to give you cancer. I am not aware of any study linking nicotine itself to cancer. If you are, I would like to see it. And I don't mean this in the obnoxious "citation-needed" kind of way. It would really give me a perspective. But to be clear, the study has to link nicotine itself, and exclude any link to tobacco or the study would not establish what I am trying to learn.
And the artificial sweeteners to make the flavorings taste sweeter.
Which are present in unregulated soft drinks.
Tobacco executives are shitting themselves over this supposedly safer, less stigmatized, less offensive product that directly threatens their livelihood.
I very highly doubt it. Given the small market share of e-cig producers, the tobacco companies have the ability to buy them out right if they thought they were a good future market.
And three, if you count concerns about inhaling products that haven't been studied for long term health effects. You know, like cigarettes used to be.
Nicotine has been extensively studied. Regardless of how it's extracted from tobacco (through what chemical process), if the end product doesn't contain nicotine attached to unstudied molecules, then your concern is about as valid as concern about long-term effects of touching plastic bags. Unnatural does not mean harmful. In fact, it's likely that it's been more studied.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You bet. Nicotine is actually a pretty cool drug. Smoking is the part that stinks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Basically big corporations are using this legislation to take over the e-cig market. If you have to pay the FDA $2 million to approve a device, then that's the end of everyone but a few big players. And that's how our government works. This has absolutely nothing to do with the actual health of people. It's all lies.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I think it's a good idea to be cautious on things like this.
Why? Isn't that the very definition of hypochondria? If all the harmful elements (I am using the word in plain-English sense rather than chemical sense) have been removed from the process and all the present elements have been studied were never shown to be harmful in these small concentrations, what justifies FDA regulation of the product?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
They are going to put in costs and overhead so these materials will no longer be produced by small shops using food grade flavorings and will instead be produced by the tobacco industry. The e-cigs used in studies where harmful output was found in the vapor have all only contained the brands produced by the tobacco companies which is a very very tiny portion of those in use. Almost all users end up using local shops producing their own juice because it is superior and you know what is in it and the devices are far superior as well.
Additionally this further likens e-cig vaporizers to tobacco use. There is no smoke, nothing is combusted so there are no dangerous oxides as found in smoke, most of the flavorings have no odor. Even the nicotine (which has health benefits as well as negatives including mental function and concentration) is only found in parts per million in exhaled vapor directly captured from the mouth of a user. If you spread that into the volume of a small half bathroom and hang out in the room chain vaping for hours it is still not even enough to be able to measure it and there are higher concentrations in safe drinking water. Unlike tar from tobacco vegetable glycerin is readily absorbed by the lungs and leaves no lasting damage. The only way you'll build it up faster than you absorb it is to chain vape one of the new sub ohm rigs popularized by vendors because they go through the liquid faster and simply stopping for a day or two would allow the body to catch up.
The VG/PG used for the bases for the liquid are substances approved by the FDA to treat people with severe lung conditions and in asthma inhalers by the FDA. The devices themselves operate in the same manner as the FDA approved vaporizers used to deliver those drugs (although they are far superior with modern electronics since they don't have a FDA granted monopoly with FDA approval costs barring entry to competition).
I would be fine with independent consumer safety testing being required as in automobiles and toys. After all, who is to say we can trust the Chinese companies producing the atomizers and heating elements used in these devices not to be deviating from the specifications and using dangerous chemicals that aren't properly cleaned in the their manufacture. But this kind of regulation is going to make the irrational and uninformed fear mongering being spread now a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well. Either you own your own body or you don't. Either the government can tell you what you can do with it or they can't.
Anyone who is pro-choice on abortion but not on cigarettes, weed, cocaine and heroin are hypocrites.
I think I own my own body. Therefore I can smoke if I so chose. (And I did as a teenager because I was so fu&&ing cool.)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Cigarette smokers are about 30% less likely to develop Parkinson's disease. It hasn't been studied for pure nicotine, but that would be the likely source of the neuroprotection.
This interests me because my father has Parkinson's, his brother had Parkinson's, and a member of my mother's family has Parkinson's. None of them have ever smoked.
I had my whole genome sequenced, and out of 10 or so known markers related to Parkinson's (according to my promethease.com full genome analysis), I have all but one (for early onset familial Parkinson's). So I'm probably screwed. Interestingly, I also have a marker that indicates my chances of developing Parkinson's is lower if I consume caffeine regularly (which I do). This might be the same one as for nicotine, although apparently that hasn't been studied genetically.
In any case, I'm hoping to reduce my chances of Parkinson's or at least delay it, so I have started chewing nicotine gum. I couldn't find any negative consequences of nicotine gum in the literature. As a bonus it seems to help me think better.
Some idiot's driving 200 km/h down a residential street? Then get out of the way!
Junkies are dropping syringes all over the beach? Then don't go to the beach!
All the grocers in your city block are importing contaminated food? Then grow your own!
Arguments like that are always quite stupid, and as a fellow Slashdotter (despite your ACing), I hope you don't need further explanation as to why.
The industry has been entirely unregulated for years. In spite of that, there have been very few incidents and none of them because of bad ejuice vendors. The reputable vendors have never been willing to sell to minors. There have been a very few potentially dangerous designs that have been fixed through customer feedback and voluntary recalls.
Even the Chinese e-juice has proven reasonably safe.
The ecigs teens have gotten their hands on have been mostly the couple of brands sold in gas stations (made by (drumroll please) R.J. Reynolds) or bought using their parent's credit cards (where the itemized charges make it fairly clear what was bought if the parents are paying any attention at all).
I'm not saying no regulation is in order, but requiring each individual item to go through a byzantine pre-martket approval that costs about a million dollars a pop is a tremendous overreach. As long as the vendors stick to already safety regulated ingredients (the U.S. ones do), that's most of the ground already covered.
ummm, are you aware of the profits?
Do you mean profits to lung-cancer surgeons, most of whom treat patients who are old enough to be on Medicare?
You really know how to spend those tax dollars effectively, don't you?
Junkies are dropping syringes all over the beach? Then don't go to the beach!
Where else am I going to find FREE syringes?
I harvest them, clean them up, and then re-sell them as "like-new" to the junkies on Venice Beach.
NOTE: Sarcasm lies above.
I hope your mom also enjoyed every dollar of taxpayer money it took for her end of life medical care as she sucked down those cigarettes.
Yes. This is exactly the point. Thank you for making it.
PS – I note that you are a foe of a friend and that you have a FIVE-digit /. ID #. None of that matters to me. You made the point that strikes to the heart of the ethical question about which this whole thread revolves. Again, thanks.
That means that other people, who partially pay your health care cost, can prohibit you from having a soldering iron in your house, and can prohibit you from skiing, rock climbing, or riding a bicycle.
I have been on one form of tobacco or another since I was 14 years old, and am now 49. I gave vaping a try about two months ago because even knowing no science, one can deduce that inhaling water (glycerine) vapor must be healthier than inhaling the fumes produced by the combustion of once-living dried plant matter. Upon further research, I could find NO evidence proving that any of the chemicals in (most brands of) vape e-liquids are harmful. Glycerine/glycol, nicotine and flavor, and that's it. So it started to seem, hypothetically, that I need not give up the chemical I have been addicted to and have enjoyed since my teens, but I can give up ALL of the bad crap in tobacco (I used chewing tobacco for 10 years as well), and all of the carcinogens and smoke and ashtrays and constant burns and lighters and coughing and smell and ash etc,, and then even save a butt-ton of money as well?? Too good to be true!! I thought if this were truly the case it would be all over the news and immediately show the potential to curb, if not eliminate, the two leading causes of death in the US, right?? Weird...
So I before I switched to vaping about two months ago I smoked 2-4 full-size premium cigars a day. Since I switched I have not had a single cigar or even a hit off of one. My lungs definitely feel better and I can breathe deeper, I have more energy, and have lost weight. No kidding. In every aspect I feel as though I have quit smoking. No more smell at home or ashes all over the car. Yes, I'm still getting the addictive chemical, but I feel as though my end-of-life clock is jumping ahead by days and months since I switched to vaping. But guess what, I'm still a smoker according to this ruling. My e-liquid nicotine levels have been reduced to 1/3 what they were when I started, and I'm about ready to go down another notch. Eventually I may be just be inhaling flavored steam. Still a smoker?
I agree about restricting access to anything with nicotine, and even the hardware (just like head-shops), but I think it will need to change soon enough once the science comes out about the difference in health risk data when comparing the two. Otherwise I have a feeling big insurance will twist this in a way to maximize profits while reducing claims, just like Uncle Sam. Just a hunch.
He who gets the last laugh, laughs last.
I hope your mom also enjoyed every dollar of taxpayer money it took for her end of life medical care as she sucked down those cigarettes.
In the UK one of the constant complaints about smoking is the cost to the taxpayer via the NHS of care for smoking related illness.
The problem with that is that cigarettes and tobacco are taxed to the hilt, with treasury income through taxation coming in at three to four times that of the typical direct costs to the NHS for treating smoking related illness.
So the government actually make a direct profit - I'm sure they would like the NHS costs to simply go away, but the common argument that smoking related illnesses costs taxpayers is essentially a fallacy.
Your freedom ends where mine starts.
That works the other way around too you know. By the way the exaggeration police are on their way.
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Mine. Because I am partially paying the health care costs of the guy who died of emphysema.
And he's probably partially payed the health care costs of whatever you'll die from. Probably more than you too because of the massive tax on cigarettes.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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If you have lung problems, them my insurance premiums will pay for your treatment (and vice versa) so we're kinda in this together.
Now you know why I'm against universal health care. (and yes there's a problem with private health care as well). It means that people like you will use this stop whatever behavior you find distasteful.
Let's ban an@l sex as it leads to more diseases and will raise health insurance rates.
Let's ban eating meat, or drinking coffee or whatever crosses your mind as you enhance government oppression and squash individual liberty under the guise of being helpful and reasonable.
Tyranny only leads to civil war. Think about how that will affect your insurance premiums.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
"Yes, your local mom and pop vape shop may not be up for doing the chemical engineering necessary to perform these kinds of tests, but maybe that is a signal they shouldn't have been in the business of compounding drugs in the first place."
Additionally, I'd also point out that you could say the same about local restaurants. Food is not just consumed orally but also exposed to heat and inhaled. Not just the food you ordered but all the food being prepared in the space of the restaurant. We certainly do have regulation and safety surrounding the production of food and testing of the ingredients for safety in food use but we do not require certification of each individual recipe.
Actually no. You're not about personal freedom - you're about the exact opposite.
You're talking about taking away freedoms. You're talking about prohibiting people from doing what they want. You're wording it backwards to make it sound like it's your freedom, but it's not the case at all.
What you really mean is you want to control everything that happens in your surrounding environment to suit you, personally, at the expense of others.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.